[jamesk2]

His site sounds like digg's recommendation system or what reddit tried to do with their recommendation system.

It's really hard to be second mover without a significantly better algorithm or lots of money. In the search engine space, Google had that better algorithm and Bing has lots of money and an equivalent algorithm. He had neither. So unless he was able to come up with a working "compatibility" algorithm, it was going to be a really though haul.

Chalk it up as a lesson learned. Good luck on your next startup. I appreciate the honesty. On my startup, I have to keep focusing on making the product work well rather than being distracted by those other "gaping loops" like scaling, marketing and monetization. Those are useless without the product.